A Blessing on the Moon (12 page)

There is nothing to do with this head.

The ground is too frozen to bury it properly, and even if it weren’t, I have no shovel, no axe, nothing but my bare hands with which to dig a
grave. I consider leaving it in the trees and letting the ravens peck at its eyes. And why not? These eyes which aimed this gun at me, the gun which I now hold stupidly in my own hand, why should they not make tasty morsels for the birds? Still, I can’t bring myself to do it. The head is dead. What gain could I derive from its desecration? Neither, though, do I wish to be carting it around until spring! The rivers are frozen and even if they weren’t, even if they were flowing freely, would letting the fish, instead of the birds, nibble at its eyes and cheeks make any difference?

I walk for I don’t know how many versts, carrying the head by its tangled hair with my good hand, the gun strapped across my chest, contemplating this dilemma.

“Look what you’ve done to me!” I’ve taken to addressing the head, although thankfully it no longer answers back. “It’s bad enough you kill me. Now you leave me with your head!”

God only knows if the poor body is still wandering about, ignorant of its own demise. I half expect to find it crouching behind every other tree. That the head should perish, while I myself persist, is a mystery. However, it was no different for Ola. I have to remind myself of that. Her body lay like a broomstick, inert on her bed, while her soul flew to the supernal realms. I witnessed it myself. Only we Jews seem destined to haunt this long continent, wandering its lengths, until God, in His wisdom, decrees otherwise.

The gun, too, is a problem. I feel absurd toting it about. What a ghastly sight I must make, with my rifle and my severed German head! If I happened upon another Jew or any traveler who could see me, how I would frighten them. I have no idea what makes it shoot or how to determine whether it is loaded, and yet, I feel a very real reluctance to surrender or abandon it. Why leave it to rust in a snowdrift where it will do no one any good? If it succeeds in merely frightening away the wolves, it will have served a purpose. I keep a wary eye out for them each dusk, but either they have not returned or else they have chosen not to reveal themselves. At times, I cannot shake the eerie feeling that I am being watched. A crash will sound in the tall cold grasses and I will turn involuntarily, searching out its source. But they are sly, these wolves, and treacherous. Still, let them come! I’ll shake my German’s head at them and rattle my gun in their faces, as fierce a sight as they might hope to see!

Perhaps I would have been happier being born a wolf.

A curious thought, but I find I cannot shake it from my head. Running with a pack, my beard overgrown and shaggy, rutting with a musky mate, we’d produce children who are hard and wild, with cruel and tearing teeth. How they will tear at your throat when you come for them with your specious laws and your cold metal guns.

“Nonsense!” I say aloud. “A fantasy! It’s absurd! I am dreaming!” I tell this to the head, whose glazed eyes stare at nothing.

My hand, swollen and infected, aches at the memory of the wolves. The teethmarks, barely discernible now in the puffy flesh, emit an oozing pus. Occasionally, I plunge it up to the wrist in snow, and the biting cold soothes it. I can hardly curl my fingers, and the flesh is turning black.

I will never be a wolf.

I will never be anything other than a dead and mutilated Jew, without even a moon to howl at overhead.

I am lost when the heavy snows begin to fall.

I nearly jump, startled by the great
whoosh
of feathers so near to my ear. He flies up, disappearing into the extraordinary whiteness of the sky, and is suddenly before my eyes: a huge black ink spill. Two feathers drop from his plumage into the blood-spattered snow at my feet. I can’t take my eyes from this sight, so stirring a picture do the black feathers and the red drops of blood make on the canvas of white snow. I am lost, mesmerized, in its radiant, shimmering asymmetries.

I have been bleeding again. This, together with my own fatigue, the heavy snowfall, and the burden of the head, has left me paralyzed. Long ago, it seems, I stopped walking, unable to move.

“
Chaimka! Chaimka!
” the Rebbe screams into my ear. I hear him, as if from a distance. My thoughts unravel like a badly knitted garment,
until nothing remains but a meaningless tangle. For a moment, I have no idea who I am or what I am doing here. As I stare into the crimson and sable patterns at my feet, they begin to shimmer and move, forming into a face with coal black eyes, ivory skin, and red and dimpled cheeks.

“Ida?” I say. My first wife. She died in childbirth, a girl herself.

“Chaimka,” she calls my name, so sweetly, so sweetly, but her distant voice is shrill and piping.

“Ida, I’m cold,” I say.

“Chaimka,” she says. “You must move! You must move!”

The Rebbe digs his claws into the shoulder of my coat, piercing with them sharply into my skin, forcing me awake. Ida’s face is gone. I’m surrounded, I see, by ice-covered trees. The pounding snow is so thick!

“Rebbe, I’m freezing!” I say. “I can’t walk! I don’t know what to do with this head!”

The Rebbe squawks and caws wildly.

“I don’t understand you, Rebbe!” I shout. “Speak in Yiddish, so I can understand!”

From between the spaces in the trees, men appear.

“Careful, careful,” each one cautions the others, as though he alone knows what he is doing. They lift and carry me through the woods. Do they have a bier? I cannot tell. My body has lost all feeling. I seem to be lying on my back in their arms. I can see the tops of the trees and the sky moving backwards, behind their shoulders and their heads.

Above me an ashen sky of faces, with eyes shining like dark stars. Apparently, I am lying on my back, on a bier of some kind, encircled by a ring of concerned friends and townspeople. Their mouths open and they shower their words down on me, like rain falling from the Heavens.

“Reb Chaim,” they shout, as though I were deaf. “You’ll soon be all right.” “Can you hear us?” “How are you feeling?” “Give him room, give him room, don’t crowd him!”

I manage to raise my head a little and see that they have covered me with filthy blankets and have bandaged, as best they can, my infected hand. Beneath the covers, my other hand is empty.

“The head,” I whisper.

“Sha, save your strength,” one of them says.

A man kneels next to me and murmurs in my ear, “Don’t worry, Reb Chaim. We have placed the head in a burlap sack and will carry it with us for you.”

After many days, my strength returns and I am able to walk unaided. The men who have carried me, I can tell, are grateful to no longer have me as a burden. I don’t blame them. Their kindnesses were more than sufficient. The snow beats down upon us with an unceasing fury. The wind whistles and howls, like a congress of dybbuks. Pushing forward is impossible, but so is standing still.

The world is nothing but snow.

We walk with raised arms, shielding our eyes from its stinging arrows and from its blinding whiteness. The Rebbe sails, not far above our heads, and we strain to hold him in our sights. Even before he was a bird, he was difficult to keep up with.

In the monotony of our travels, we eventually lose count of the days. Except when absolutely necessary, we hardly speak.

Everyone is morose, exhausted, and numb.

A small boy named Efraim is the first to see it, during a break in the storm. He is a sickly child, with a leg so badly damaged, it dangles behind him like a puppet, a marionette with broken strings. The littlest student at our yeshiva, he arrived at the pit in the forest that dark day, with a goose-down pillow under one arm and a tractate of the Talmud tucked beneath the other. This so amused the soldiers they had to cluck their tongues. After shooting first the pillow and then the holy book, they informed Efraim sadly that they had lost their heads. They had misspent his meager allotment of bullets and would now have to beat him to death. And this they did, kicking him swiftly between them, like a small ball in sport. Knocking him in the ribs with their rifle butts, they swept him like so much straw into his grave.

Now affectionately called Pillow by many in our group, he is something of a mascot, our treasure, and every mother’s darling.

When, because of his leg, he can walk no further, a great circle of hands will reach down and lift him onto a sturdy pair of shoulders. This honor, however, he accepts only reluctantly and only when he has completely exhausted himself. He prefers to keep up with Reb Elimelech and myself, in our small quorum of elders, hobbling along with a crutch Reb Itzik fashioned for him from a tree.

Now “Reb Chaim! Reb Elimelech!” Efraim shouts from atop a snowy ridge, pointing to the valley on the other side.

“What is it, Pillow?” Reb Elimelech calls out, smiling. The boy likes to play scout.

He calls back, “You must come! Quickly!”

“We must come, we must come,” Reb Elimelech shrugs pleasantly to me and I am caught off guard by his warming cordiality. Since our talk that night on the stump, relations between us have been strained at best. “Do you hear, Reb Chaim?” he says now with a frank and pleasant face. “What does the boy think, we’re going to turn and go back?”

“All right, all right, we’re coming!” I shout up to him. “Be patient, Pillow.”

Together, Reb Elimelech and I climb the snowy hill, stopping on the ridge. Reb Elimelech lays a smooth hand on Pillow’s shoulder. The boy leans into him, threading his arms around the shank of Elimelech’s thigh. I have tied the burlap sack with the German’s head in it around my waist with a rope and the boy will go nowhere near it.

The three of us look down into the valley, startled by what we see.

Below us, not half a verst away, is an old and rambling building,
perhaps an estate or a resort of some kind. It’s as long as a city block or nearly. Its facade glitters with thousands and thousands of windows, each with its own ornate carving, each catching the light of the sun. A river surrounds it on all sides and its waters appear to be flowing.

“How is this possible?” I say to no one in particular.

“Look at it sparkle,” Reb Elimelech hums beneath his breath.

“What is it?” Pillow cries.

“Certainly not water,” Reb Elimelech pulls at the silver threads of his beard. “Otherwise it would be frozen.”

Behind us, the little town of Jews trudges listlessly through the drifts, too distant for us to hurry them with our calls or excited gestures.

The three of us, Efraim, Reb Elimelech, and myself, look again towards the sumptuous hotel. I squint for a better look, cupping my eyes with my hands, and see spilling forth from its many doorways a great tumult of people: bakers in aprons; chefs in tall hats; waiters with starched shirtfronts and shortwaisted coats and long tuxedo tails; a fleet of chambermaids, slimhipped with full bodices beneath their tight pinafores; a line of bellmen, their round hats pushed jauntily to the sides of their heads, each cocked to the left.

Each uniform is a crisp and snowy white.

“A mirage,” I say. “We’ve become snowblind.”

“But I see it, too,” Reb Elimelech confirms, shielding his eyes with the brim of his hat.

And the people continue to pour forth. Brawny masseuses in loose-fitting clothes, laundresses in knotted babushkas, porters in livery, dishwashers and gardeners, dustmen and groundskeepers. They gather before the main entrance, standing in lines, like a civic group posing for an official photograph. They smile to us, across the distance, waiting for their administrators to join them, which they do and quite soon. The Maître d’Hôtel, the Concierge, and the Hotel’s Direktor. Their swift arrivals prompt a smattering of sincere applause from their gathered minions.

“But who are all those people, Reb Chaim?” Pillow asks, hiding now half behind Reb Elimelech, half behind myself.

The Direktor, a heavy man in a bulky blue suit, steps forward, approaching the far side of the river careful not to walk too near its plashing waters. From there, he raises his hands and beckons to us.

“He’s beckoning to you, Reb Chaim.”

“To me?” I regard Reb Elimelech dubiously.

“To whom else?” he says.

I scan the Heavens, but there are no helpful birds in sight.

“Herr Skibelski,” the stout Direktor calls up the slope with a silver megaphone handed to him, by a bellman, on a silver tray.

“This is Chaim Skibelski,” I call back, hanging my cane on the crook of my arm and cupping my hands to my mouth.

“We are ready to receive your party now,” the man shouts, again through the silver mouthpiece.

“Eh? What did he say?” Reb Elimelech mutters in my ear.

“He said they’re ready to receive us.”

Reb Elimelech glances quickly down the slope at the nearly three thousand souls struggling along behind us.

“Dear Heavens,” he says, fretting. “I think they’ve overbooked.”

We descend the little slope, the three of us, and walk carefully towards the river, the German’s head bouncing against my hip. Pillow holds on to the shank of my cane. The slant of the hill is difficult for him with his useless leg.

Nearer, we see that it is not an illusion at all. The river, indeed, is flowing, despite the frosty temperatures. I lift my eyes from its bank and look across at the beardless face of the Direktor, smiling above his tie and the collar of his blue serge suit. His ruddy cheeks glow with health and vigor in this bracing wind, and his blond hair, thinning on top, blows in slightly separating strands.

“Willkommen, willkommen,” he says, placing one large hand inside the other. “All is prepared, all is prepared.”

Despite the river’s churning noises, his voice carries across it. We can hear him easily and he no longer needs the megaphone.

“Excuse me, Herr Direktor, forgive us,” I say. “But I don’t understand. What exactly have you prepared?”